The Elephant, Umbrella, and Quarrelling Cocks: Disaggregating Partisanship in Ghana’s Fourth Republic

Fridy, Kevin S.

doi:10.1093/afraf/adl040

Cited by 112 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Ghana is perhaps the country which in the whole of Africa, since 1992, has made the most strenuous efforts to consolidate its advances in democratic practice, achieved inter alia through reforms in electoral practice, involvement of foreign observers in monitoring of elections and a drive to increase the electoral participation rate (Fridy, 2007;Branch and Cheeseman, 2008;Whitfield, 2009). Each of the five elections since 1992 has been tightly contested between the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each of the five elections since 1992 has been tightly contested between the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party. At each of the five elections (won by the NDC in 1992 and in 1996, the NPP in 2000 and 2004, and by the NDC again in 2008) the incumbent parties, respectively rooted in the (Ewe-speaking) south-east and the (Ashanti) south-centre of the country, have aimed their pre-election boost outwards from these 'safe seats' towards regions and interest-groups in which they perceive themselves as having the biggest chances of picking up uncommitted votes -namely towards the farmers of the poor Northern region in the case of the NDC, and towards wage-workers in Accra in the case of both parties (Fridy, 2007, especially maps on pp. 287 and 288).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…287 and 288). Each of these groups contains a high proportion of low-income people, and the fact that a high proportion of the pre-election expenditure increase in each of these years went to the health, education and social protection sectors, which have a high propensity to reach low-income groups (table 4 below) enabled the pre-election stimulus to be more effectively targeted both on 'floating voters' and uncommitted voters who in many cases had not previously voted (Fridy, 2007) -to the benefit of the incumbent party -and on low-income groups 16 -to the pleasure of the aid donors. Delighted both by the improvements in governance and by the rapid fall in poverty from 1991 onwards, the donors decided to condone Ghana's persistingly slack macroeconomic performance 17 and throughout the subsequent twenty years have rewarded the Ghana government with high and stable aid flows, within the framework of the IMF's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (table 3).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The African Political Business Cycle: Varieties of Experience

Mosley

Chiripanhura

2016

The Journal of Development Studies

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Abstract:We seek to understand both the incidence and the impact of the African political business cycle in the light of a literature which has argued that, with major extensions of democracy since the 1990s, the cycle has both become more intense and has made African political systems more fragile. With the help of country-case studies, we argue, first, that the African political business cycle is not homogeneous, and is rarely encountered in so-called 'dominant-party systems' where a pre-election stimulus confers little political advantage. Secondly, we show that, in those countries where a political cycle does occur, it does not necessarily cause institutional damage. Whether it does or not depends not so much on whether there is an electoral cycle as on whether this calms or exacerbates fears of an unjust allocation of resources. In other words, the composition of the pre-election stimulus, in terms of its allocation between different categories of voter, is as important as its size.1 Our thanks to Helene Ehrhart, Victor Lledo, Vera Troeger, Paul Whiteley and other participants at seminars at the University of Essex and the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford (March 2010) for most valuable comments on an early version. The paper derives from work done under research contract 156/25/0016, The Political Economy of Pro-Poor Adjustment and Growth, within the ESRC's World Economy and Finance Programme, and we are grateful to the ESRC for their support and encouragement. 2The African political business cycle: varieties of experience 1.IntroductionFor well over a century, the economies of industrialised countries have been subject to systematic economic fluctuations, often known as business cycles. No amount of macroeconomic management has been able to get rid of these cycles, and many have claimed that governments within a democratic system have an incentive to stimulate rather than restrain a pattern of 'stop-go' in their policies. It is tempting, for example, to buy popularity by boosting the economy before an election, for example through tax cuts or monetary expansion, knowing that the costs of doing this, for example, in terms of increased inflation, may not be foreseen by voters 2 , and in any case do not have to be paid until after the election has been won. At that point, the government may well choose to deflate the economy, both in order to pay for the preelection boost and possibly also to restrain wage claims by making the workforce fear for their jobs 3 . Thus, the political process may of itself tend to augment rather than restrain the business cycle -as observed in a number of Western industrialised countries and analysed by, for example, Kalecki (1943), Nordhaus (1975), one of the present authors (Mosley, 1978) 4 , and Rogoff (1990). And the now firmly embedded global economic environment of open capital markets may, as many have discovered to their cost during the recent global recession, amplify the ease with which such shocks once administered can be passed on to other countri...

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The African Political Business Cycle: Varieties of Experience

Mosley

Chiripanhura

2016

The Journal of Development Studies

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“…Horowitz summarizes this thinking when stating that in ethnically segmented societies "parties organized non-ethnically are rare or nonexistent" (Horowitz 2000:301). Accordingly, parties and party ideologies are not seen to 3 For just a few examples see Basedau and Stroh 2009, Lindberg and Morisson 2008, Fridy 2007, Morrison 2004, Cowen and Laakso 2002, Daniel et al 1999, Nugent 1999, Kandeh 1998). …”

Section: The Study Of African Parties and Political Ideologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology in Nonindustrialized Societies: Taking Party Manifesto Research to Africa

Elischer¹

2010

SSRN Journal

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Despite a growing interest in African political parties, no comparative analyses of political ideology in Africa have been undertaken to date. This study addresses this shortcoming by applying the Manifesto Research Group's (MRG) coding scheme to a complete set of African party manifestos in three African countries. The study's main aim is to determine whether a research tool that has been seminal in the study of Western politics can be used to study political parties in nonindustrialized societies. In a first step the study examines the extent to which African manifestos advance programmatic ideas. Although most parties fail to do so, results indicate drastic differences between parties. The study subsequently investigates how African parties position themselves on a right-left spectrum.Most parties show a bias towards the political Left. Finally, the study examines the stance of individual parties on specific policy issues such as democracy and human rights, education, corruption, youth and women, and intercommunal relations. The study argues that although the MRG scheme has been designed against the historical background of European politics, it can be applied to advance the study of African parties.

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“…When these results were analysed alongside available census data I got a pretty good sense of the impact of certain demographic characteristics on a district's partisan proclivities (Fridy 2007). Hoping to apply a similar analysis to Ghana's neighbours to understand better the comparative implications of my research, I set out to compile a comprehensive data set of West African elections at the sub-national level from the late colonial period through to the present.…”

Section: The Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Africa’s Disappearing Election Results: Why Announcing the Winner is Simply Not Enough

Fridy¹

2009

JAE

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In many African countries releasing election results means simply revealing the winners and losers and publicising their percentage of the national vote. This norm makes it very difficult for researchers interested in studying African elections to collect detailed election data and for citizens to evaluate the validity of the results. This article describes the difficulties associated with collecting sub-national election results in a select set of West African countries, explores some of the potential reasons for these difficulties, arguesfor an alteration in the status quo and pushes election observers and scholars to demand more of African electoral commissions.

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The Elephant, Umbrella, and Quarrelling Cocks: Disaggregating Partisanship in Ghana’s Fourth Republic

Cited by 112 publications

References 14 publications

The African Political Business Cycle: Varieties of Experience

The African Political Business Cycle: Varieties of Experience

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology in Nonindustrialized Societies: Taking Party Manifesto Research to Africa

Africa’s Disappearing Election Results: Why Announcing the Winner is Simply Not Enough

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